5/22/12
The NATO summit is over. While we had no major “incidents,” thank God, during the brief bout of pomp and circumstance that plagued our fair city, the central business district was virtually a ghost town. Businesses lost trade and travelers and commuters were horribly inconvenienced, as were cops and other security personnel who had to exchange time with their families or other pursuits for putting up with abuse from loutish and logorrheaic lark seekers while patrolling in 90 degree plus heat in what amounted to heavy armor. The economic ledger, so far, is decidedly in the negative. But Mayor Emanuel had his day in the sun, and so the consanguineous and breathless media are delighted, agog, really, at the splendidness of the Summit. The Mayor, for his part, apologized for the “inconvenience” suffered by the citizens and businesses of Chicago and proclaimed that, through the summit and his skillful working of the world leaders who attended, Chicago will enjoy a $120mm net benefit from the summit.
So many thoughts come to mind.
First, weren’t the economic benefits we were supposed to reap from this supposed confab among the justifications for what would have been a complete fiasco had it not been for the efforts of the Chicago Police Department? How does closing businesses benefit the city? What economic benefit does the city, and business owners, derive when the city is effectively closed down? The mayor says that the showcasing of the city that the NATO summit provided will result in future economic benefits to the city, especially since the leaders here loved him so much. (Apparently, he mistook the heads of state for the local media, political, and politically connected business communities, but I digress.) Showcasing? As the Chicago Sun-Times, Tribune, and other media organs reported, this summit was largely ignored by media outside Chicago, including media in those countries from whom the participants hailed. That the summit that was supposed to showcase us was largely ignored overseas, and even in American cities outside about a 60 mile perimeter of our fair city, should come as no surprise. Even yours truly, who has more than a passing interest in world politics, ignores such piffles as these summits. Nothing is accomplished, other than endless exercises in self-aggrandizement (Oh…THAT’S why Rahm likes these circuses so much! But, again, I digress.) at these one or two day affairs. All the important, meaningful stuff is settled beforehand, leaving the, er, baloney, to these affairs.
So how are we supposed to derive $120mm in future economic benefits from a summit that was largely ignored? Who knows? But who can challenge this number? There are two tricks to prognostication…political, financial, economic, or otherwise: either make a lot of predictions and then remind people only of those that came true or make predictions the realization or lack thereof of which will take place so far in the future that no one currently breathing can possibly prove their accuracy or inaccuracy. Apparently, Mr. Emanuel is engaging in the latter. So far, however, given the costs of this carnival and the loss of business for downtown merchants, we, as a city, are decidedly in the red.
This party for the privileged was also supposed to help Chicago overcome the non-reputation, or reputation for being a backwater hick cow town, that Mr. Emanuel and his predecessors are convinced that our genuinely great and world renowned city has. (I suppose that if I spent almost my entire career in Washington, where people think nowhere but Washington and possibly New York is worthy of notice, I, too, would think so poorly of Chicago. So Mr. Emanuel clearly has an excuse for his low opinion of Chicago. But what excuse do Richard II and Jane Byrne have? See my 5/16/12 post, “CHICAGO IS…THE UNION STOCKYARDS…CHICAGO IS…THE WRIGLEY BUILDING…CHICAGO IS…ONE TOWN THAT WON’T LET YOU DOWN…” But I digress again.) But, again, if, as our media reported, no one outside a perimeter ending at, say, Peotone, noticed this summit, how did we overcome the inferiority complex the pols insist we have whenever the opportunity arises to host an event involving lots of contracts for their friends and contributors?
The Mayor apologizes for the “inconvenience” suffered by citizens and businesses. Inconvenience?! Losing a late Spring weekend’s revenue in these tough economic times transcends “inconvenience;” such a loss could make the difference between making and losing money for a quarter or a year. In a few cases, it is not too much of a stretch to say that losing a weekend’s revenue could mean the difference between staying open and closing the doors. But the mayor, who has spent his whole life either, er, nursing at the public mammary gland or making phone calls for those who would like to affix their own soup coolers to the aforementioned gland, knows nothing of the difficulties and challenges of having to run a business or meet a payroll. The only “private sector” employers he knows are part of the government/business/crony cabal that has run this city for longer than he has been alive. What is a mere weekend’s revenue for some piddling business to this titan of government and finance?
The only people who came out of this looking good, in the first instance great, are the Chicago Police Department and Rahm Emanuel. The former was completely expected; the police in this town nearly always perform spectacularly under even the most trying of circumstances. The latter was also eminently predictable; given the sycophantic nature of the local and national press, Rahm Emanuel always is made to look terrific, infallible, fantastic, wonderful, tough, decisive, etc., etc., etc.
Showing posts with label Chicago Tribune. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chicago Tribune. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Friday, May 18, 2012
PIPING THE MAN’S TUNE
5/18/12
Both the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune reported in their 5/18/12 editions that Mayor Rahm Emanuel is “livid” about the work Ricketts family patriarch Joe Ricketts is doing with a Super Pac called the Ending Spending Action Fund. Apparently, depending on who is telling the story, Joe Ricketts is actively working with the Fund, or merely listened to a proposal from the Fund, to run ads that remind voters of the tirades of Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Barrack Obama’s pastor before the aspiring president through the Reverend under the bus during the 2008 campaign. Mr. Emanuel apparently doesn’t like that voters in this year’s presidential election might be reminded of the less savory aspects of President Obama’s background and, as a consequence, is not taking phone calls from Joe Ricketts’ kids (Tom, Laura, et al.) who own the Chicago Cubs and are looking for a taxpayer handout to enhance the value of the toy they bought with the trust fund their father left them. So it looks like negotiations regarding a substantial contribution by you, the taxpayer, toward putting $300 mm in the pockets of the Ricketts family are postponed until either Joe Ricketts repents or Mayor Emanuel gets over his hissy fit.
One can decry Mayor Emanuel’s attempts to control the free speech rights of Joe Ricketts all one wants, and many are doing so today. But this would not have been an issue had the Ricketts family not lined up at the trough in order to jack up the returns on their “investment” in the Cubs and Wrigley Field. Once you take the man’s money, you have to dance to the man’s tune. The Ricketts family, despite protests to the contrary when they bought the team, has come to Mr. Emanuel hat in hand and now has to submit to whatever the Mayor demands unless they somehow summon the courage to say something like “No. We value our liberty more than the hundreds of millions of dollars we want to leech off the taxpayers to make ourselves even richer than our daddy has made us.” Don’t count on that. The Ricketts will just have to suck it up and behave if they want their spot at the trough, which they apparently value far more than such quaint notions as the liberty to express one’s self. What’s freedom when an ultra-luxury lifestyle is at stake? In this sense, the Ricketts family will do what those members of the our city’s “private sector,” and political community, whom Mr. Emanuel publicly extols but privately takes for the meretricious stooges they are, have done: shut up, roll over, and beg for the bones the people who run this town can hand out. (See, inter alia, my 5/13/12 post, HOW DO I LOVE THEE, OH MIGHTY AND WISE RAHM? LET ME COUNT THE WAYS.) This behavior towards the butt smoochee on the Fifth Floor did not start with Mr. Emanuels’ ascension to his latest stepping stone, but you already knew that.
One would make a better, but still not very good, argument, were one to advance the notion that Joe Ricketts doesn’t own the team; his kids do. But he provided the spondulicks that enabled his progeny to go off on this particular lark. And Joe should know as well as anybody else that politicians like Mr. Emanuel have a difficult time making fine distinctions between, say, fathers and sons and daughters. Further, to the extent that Joe Ricketts is involved here, he is showing the blatant hypocrisy that has infuriated people as ideologically diverse as the Tea Party and Occupy movements: Joe Ricketts is against federal spending, but he really seems to like the type of spending, and other raids on the bank account of the average guy, that makes his family even richer.
Both the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune reported in their 5/18/12 editions that Mayor Rahm Emanuel is “livid” about the work Ricketts family patriarch Joe Ricketts is doing with a Super Pac called the Ending Spending Action Fund. Apparently, depending on who is telling the story, Joe Ricketts is actively working with the Fund, or merely listened to a proposal from the Fund, to run ads that remind voters of the tirades of Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Barrack Obama’s pastor before the aspiring president through the Reverend under the bus during the 2008 campaign. Mr. Emanuel apparently doesn’t like that voters in this year’s presidential election might be reminded of the less savory aspects of President Obama’s background and, as a consequence, is not taking phone calls from Joe Ricketts’ kids (Tom, Laura, et al.) who own the Chicago Cubs and are looking for a taxpayer handout to enhance the value of the toy they bought with the trust fund their father left them. So it looks like negotiations regarding a substantial contribution by you, the taxpayer, toward putting $300 mm in the pockets of the Ricketts family are postponed until either Joe Ricketts repents or Mayor Emanuel gets over his hissy fit.
One can decry Mayor Emanuel’s attempts to control the free speech rights of Joe Ricketts all one wants, and many are doing so today. But this would not have been an issue had the Ricketts family not lined up at the trough in order to jack up the returns on their “investment” in the Cubs and Wrigley Field. Once you take the man’s money, you have to dance to the man’s tune. The Ricketts family, despite protests to the contrary when they bought the team, has come to Mr. Emanuel hat in hand and now has to submit to whatever the Mayor demands unless they somehow summon the courage to say something like “No. We value our liberty more than the hundreds of millions of dollars we want to leech off the taxpayers to make ourselves even richer than our daddy has made us.” Don’t count on that. The Ricketts will just have to suck it up and behave if they want their spot at the trough, which they apparently value far more than such quaint notions as the liberty to express one’s self. What’s freedom when an ultra-luxury lifestyle is at stake? In this sense, the Ricketts family will do what those members of the our city’s “private sector,” and political community, whom Mr. Emanuel publicly extols but privately takes for the meretricious stooges they are, have done: shut up, roll over, and beg for the bones the people who run this town can hand out. (See, inter alia, my 5/13/12 post, HOW DO I LOVE THEE, OH MIGHTY AND WISE RAHM? LET ME COUNT THE WAYS.) This behavior towards the butt smoochee on the Fifth Floor did not start with Mr. Emanuels’ ascension to his latest stepping stone, but you already knew that.
One would make a better, but still not very good, argument, were one to advance the notion that Joe Ricketts doesn’t own the team; his kids do. But he provided the spondulicks that enabled his progeny to go off on this particular lark. And Joe should know as well as anybody else that politicians like Mr. Emanuel have a difficult time making fine distinctions between, say, fathers and sons and daughters. Further, to the extent that Joe Ricketts is involved here, he is showing the blatant hypocrisy that has infuriated people as ideologically diverse as the Tea Party and Occupy movements: Joe Ricketts is against federal spending, but he really seems to like the type of spending, and other raids on the bank account of the average guy, that makes his family even richer.
Sunday, May 13, 2012
HOW DO I LOVE THEE, OH MIGHTY AND WISE RAHM? LET ME COUNT THE WAYS.
5/13/12
I genuinely tried to read the articles in today’s Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times on Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s being about to conclude his first year in office. But I couldn’t. Even considering that such retrospectives are nearly always intended to be puff pieces, these love letters were intolerably obsequious. The only thing that one would learn from reading this drivel is that no one, absolutely no one, gets better press than Rahm Emanuel.
We are left then with a question: Why does Rahm Emanuel inspire such devotion on the part of Chicago’s, and, to a lesser extent, and only because he is not as saliently on their radar screen, the nation’s, press corps?
It seems to yours truly that the Mayor’s good press springs from his consanguinity with the press corps. Just as most of the press in the greatest city in the world is composed of what in a simpler time would be called yuppies, Mr. Emanuel is the ultimate yuppie pol. Indeed, he is the yuppie standard-bearer against the (to Mr. Emanuel and his cheerleaders) rude, crude political denizens of the south and southwest sides. Like much, probably most, of his adoring press, he did not grow up in the city, comes from a wealthy background, and never had to spend a heck of a lot of time in the trenches…any trenches. He has spent his life in and around public office with no experience in the actual private sector, unless one counts selling public sector access “private sector experience.” He grew up on the north shore and lives on the north side. He gives the impression that, like most of the press, he is not very comfortable once he gets south of Congress unless he is being driven down south Lake Shore to Hyde Park. Like most of the press in our town, he considers a trip to even my beloved Beverly and its environs, one of the most beautiful, safe, and civil neighborhoods in the city, if not the world, an urban adventure. Like many of our press denizens, he was well, and expensively, educated at an exclusive eastern school (in his case, Sarah Lawrence) before returning to Northwestern for what people in his stratum of society consider a “Chicago” experience. Like most of our press, he believes deeply in the wisdom of government and is devoted to the notion that government can solve all of society’s ills if only it is in the hands of the right people, a belief rooted in Plato’s notion of the philosopher king, and there is no doubt in the minds of either Rahm or his admirers whom Plato must have presciently had in mind when expostulating on this notion some 2,400 years ago. While ceaselessly praising “the private sector,” Rahm and his devotees in the press consider the “private sector” as merely an appendage of the government, there to pay the bills and do the bidding of the estimables who have managed, with the help of the “private sector’s” money, to hoodwink enough of an apathetic and largely clueless electorate into putting these thoroughly entitled wise men in office. The “private sector,” or at least those portions of it which Rahm and his compatriots would deign to deal with, has completely bought into this program, by the way; what’s principle when a place at the trough with plenty of elbow room on either side is at stake? No wonder Mr. Emanuel thinks he is completely in tune with Chicago’s “private sector;” he has surrounded himself with sycophants, from both the private and public sectors, who are completely dependent on his largesse with the taxpayers’ money for their prosperity or, in some cases, their very survival. This explains the other great emotion, besides devotion, that Mr. Emanuel inspires: Fear. But that is another post.
Despite my philosophical differences with Mr. Emanuel, there are many (well, maybe several) of his initiatives with which I agree. It is curious, though, that he is able to get away with some of these when he would be leading the hoots of derision if identical moves were initiated by a Republican, but I digress. Mr. Emanuel has done a good job as mayor, especially in light of the fiscal equivalent of a neutron bomb attack left him by his predecessor. And I congratulate Mayor Emanuel and wish him well; after all, he is a capable man and my home town is in his hands. But note that I do so without a hint of either consanguinity or sycophancy.
I genuinely tried to read the articles in today’s Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times on Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s being about to conclude his first year in office. But I couldn’t. Even considering that such retrospectives are nearly always intended to be puff pieces, these love letters were intolerably obsequious. The only thing that one would learn from reading this drivel is that no one, absolutely no one, gets better press than Rahm Emanuel.
We are left then with a question: Why does Rahm Emanuel inspire such devotion on the part of Chicago’s, and, to a lesser extent, and only because he is not as saliently on their radar screen, the nation’s, press corps?
It seems to yours truly that the Mayor’s good press springs from his consanguinity with the press corps. Just as most of the press in the greatest city in the world is composed of what in a simpler time would be called yuppies, Mr. Emanuel is the ultimate yuppie pol. Indeed, he is the yuppie standard-bearer against the (to Mr. Emanuel and his cheerleaders) rude, crude political denizens of the south and southwest sides. Like much, probably most, of his adoring press, he did not grow up in the city, comes from a wealthy background, and never had to spend a heck of a lot of time in the trenches…any trenches. He has spent his life in and around public office with no experience in the actual private sector, unless one counts selling public sector access “private sector experience.” He grew up on the north shore and lives on the north side. He gives the impression that, like most of the press, he is not very comfortable once he gets south of Congress unless he is being driven down south Lake Shore to Hyde Park. Like most of the press in our town, he considers a trip to even my beloved Beverly and its environs, one of the most beautiful, safe, and civil neighborhoods in the city, if not the world, an urban adventure. Like many of our press denizens, he was well, and expensively, educated at an exclusive eastern school (in his case, Sarah Lawrence) before returning to Northwestern for what people in his stratum of society consider a “Chicago” experience. Like most of our press, he believes deeply in the wisdom of government and is devoted to the notion that government can solve all of society’s ills if only it is in the hands of the right people, a belief rooted in Plato’s notion of the philosopher king, and there is no doubt in the minds of either Rahm or his admirers whom Plato must have presciently had in mind when expostulating on this notion some 2,400 years ago. While ceaselessly praising “the private sector,” Rahm and his devotees in the press consider the “private sector” as merely an appendage of the government, there to pay the bills and do the bidding of the estimables who have managed, with the help of the “private sector’s” money, to hoodwink enough of an apathetic and largely clueless electorate into putting these thoroughly entitled wise men in office. The “private sector,” or at least those portions of it which Rahm and his compatriots would deign to deal with, has completely bought into this program, by the way; what’s principle when a place at the trough with plenty of elbow room on either side is at stake? No wonder Mr. Emanuel thinks he is completely in tune with Chicago’s “private sector;” he has surrounded himself with sycophants, from both the private and public sectors, who are completely dependent on his largesse with the taxpayers’ money for their prosperity or, in some cases, their very survival. This explains the other great emotion, besides devotion, that Mr. Emanuel inspires: Fear. But that is another post.
Despite my philosophical differences with Mr. Emanuel, there are many (well, maybe several) of his initiatives with which I agree. It is curious, though, that he is able to get away with some of these when he would be leading the hoots of derision if identical moves were initiated by a Republican, but I digress. Mr. Emanuel has done a good job as mayor, especially in light of the fiscal equivalent of a neutron bomb attack left him by his predecessor. And I congratulate Mayor Emanuel and wish him well; after all, he is a capable man and my home town is in his hands. But note that I do so without a hint of either consanguinity or sycophancy.
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